Manufacturing Jobs: One Month to Abject Failure September 2, 2016

Politicians often make promises that aren’t kept. But smart politicians make vague, hard-to-measure promises so they can’t be caught when the promise falls apart. Not-quite-as-smart politicians make more concrete promises, but in an area where they can at least try to keep them (like, say, reducing the budget, or increasing funding for a certain program).

But it takes a pretty dense politician to make concrete politicians in an area where he has absolutely no power to affect the outcome. Doubling exports within five years, for example (see tomorrow’s post), or adding 1 million manufacturing jobs within 4 years.

The latter promise is just about to come due – President Obama made that promise at the DNC in September of 2012. Next month we can count the manufacturing jobs added and see if he gets anywhere close to a million. Spoiler alert, it ain’t gonna happen: